Hi RMA team,
We need a fix for a better integration of plugins, in this case in particular: seeing Octane materials in:
1. Windows explorer thumbnails
2. Rhino’s Materials tab
3. Rendered viewport
Let me please explain with examples…
We realize we need a good, fast, cheap rendering solution inside Rhino. After seeing that any of the solutions being developed by your team continue to be under our expected threshold of quality, we decided that Octane is the best alternative for us for now. (Please don’t use this topic to tell me why render engine X or Y is better than Octane, or why Rhino’s rendering solutions would work as well for us ‘if we only did X or Y’. Create your own topic for that side discussion and I’ll be happy to discuss it there)
We are happy with the rendering results in terms of what we get with ease of setup using a template scene and materials library, replicable results in various models, and clean n’ fast output with multiple render passes, even using a laptop’s GPU.
Our biggest frustration is that we are running blind when it comes to previewing materials appearance and assignment.
This is what a typical file looks like:
The render output is what we want:
Even at 32 samples (5 seconds of rendertime in this single Quadro GPU laptop) it already gives us a good sense of material, lighting and overall rendering appearance.
…however we run in to a lot of problems because we can’t see our materials in any of these places:
1. Windows explorer thumbnails
The .rmtl file type creates a silly generic orange oil paint icon (see below). This is absolutely useless for us. We need to see what the actual material looks like. Especially since Rhino uses the Windows file browser UI and appearances to interface with the libraries tab inside Rhino.
2. Rhino’s Materials tab
In this area all the thumbnails and non-existent, like here:
You can even see there in the lower part the visual garbage or repeated artifacts from trying to scroll on the options of the selected material and the pane not refreshing properly. Nothing performs adequately here.
Every once in a blue moon we see materials tarting to update, like in this case:
We have no idea what causes Rhino to update and display these thumbnails, but very very rarely happens. But even when it does happen, the thumbnails are not an accurate representation of the materials they really are.
3. Rendered viewport
Although the Octane viewport is very fast, it’s not an interactive viewport, in the sense that we cannot use it to drag-n’-drop materials, move emmisive planes (lights), or perform any edits or selection on the viewport. So we need to work with the rendered display viewport. And currently the rendered display viewport looks nothing like the rendering output, as you can see here:
I have pinpointed 3 problems. I’m not sure if these are integration problems because Octane it’s not doing their integration work completely, or because Rhino is not doing its part. This is one of the reasons I do not like using plugins, but in this case we do not see any other viable option.
Any cooperation by @andy’s team and by @paulphysicalc (developer of the Octane for Rhino plugin) would be greatly appreciated.
I can provide example files, scenes, materials, whatever assets or time you need from our part. This is a very important part of our workflow and right now is one of our biggest areas of friction. We rather see this resolved quickly so we can focus on our work.
Best Regards,
Gustavo
